


Lexicographer

by Anonymous



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-06-04
Updated: 2009-06-04
Packaged: 2017-10-02 10:01:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries; a poor, harmless drudge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lexicographer

**Author's Note:**

> For [Anca](http://ancabell.livejournal.com) in the 2006 [V/O Xmas](http://commuity.livejournal.com/vo _xmas) ficathon. Thanks to [Melle](http://melle.livejournal.com) for her encouragement. Title from Dr Johnson's Dictionary, Samuel Johnson.

#### secret

The overnight camping trip has become everyone's story. Even people who weren't there talk about it as if they were, as if they know anything about it, as if they have a right to those fragile hours.

But for Orlando, much of that night will stay locked away, like the bottle of sweet champagne that he's saving for the special occasion he doesn't truly believe he's ever going to have. He'll talk about the shot itself, the bursting colors of the sky, the way Viggo's just fucking crazy for even thinking of it. But he won't talk about the way he poured salt crystals onto his paper plate and ran his finger through them, leaving a gap in the middle, instead of touching Viggo's temple; he'll never say a word about the way the campfire gilded Viggo's skin until Orlando was afraid he'd be burned if he traced the plane of Viggo's shoulderblade; he's never admitted how, when Viggo crooked his finger and mumbled, "C'mere," he wanted Viggo to hand him a burning coal rather than a few sheets of scribbled-out poetry to crunch up and use for kindling.

#### western

Suddenly the days are full—photoshoots, interviews, contracts, grocery shopping, glittering jewelry, ink and oil on his skin, pretty girls and pretty boys and pretty places and pretty photographs—and he disappears.

Wakes one morning to find he doesn't know whom he's seeing in the mirror. Everyone else knows what's going on and he listens to them, and the horizon drifts further and further away.

He smiles and glances out of the various windows of cars with something like longing, searching for something like faith. The California landscape is empty with dust and doubt.

More people crowd his peripheral vision, and he looks away. There are doorways full to bursting in the corner of his eye, and one night, he locks the door behind him when he leaves. It's easy, and he turns the key. Engine hums on, just like it's supposed to, and he turns left the first time the road splits.

Keeps going. Hopes there's an ocean at the end of the road. Doesn't dare expect a sunrise to greet him and lead him on, but hopes for one at his back.

He's lucky. The road ahead is painted in scarlet, flooded with rose, before he feels anything but breathless with desire sweeping through his lungs, colder and more trusting than anything else he's ever felt.

Lucky.

There's always more to want.

#### discovery

It's easy to not think of it; to forget. There is so much to do, so many things to learn, so many places to explore. He's busy. He's happy. Enough.

More than enough—he has so much. He has so much to be grateful for, and he tries to remember that, tries to be conscious of how lucky he is. How _lucky_ he is to have boots to have mud on, boots that fit, boots that are comfortable, boots that are solid and warm and steady under his feet.

The earth isn't any of that.

The earth wobbles, spins, snatches him up and hurtles him through space without his consent. He is grateful for that, too, or he tries to be: that he isn't, that he cannot be, in stasis. You have to move on, they tell him eagerly, get past it, and he laughs.

It's so far behind him he can't even see how he got here.

Until the day that Viggo walks up the path he'd been deliberately ignoring and smiles as if he expected to find Orlando right where he left him. "Hi," he says, and his voice is just as Orlando didn't remember it.

#### welcome

It's hard to remember he's a foreigner here. He's never surprised by the color of the currency, the flat sing-song of the accent has been familiar from childhood, and the smog burns comfortably in his lungs.

He forgets himself, sometimes. He wonders why he doesn't have a distinct memory of the riots.

The city has taken him in gladly, his passport his smile and his skin and his eyes, and he wanders through the streets freely, never challenged, his right as a citizen unquestioned.

He doesn't question it himself. His visa is not for the city or the country, but for the countryside of Viggo's heart, and it will never expire. He will never leave.

He is not a foreigner, because this is home; because Viggo has taken him in, a refugee from his own life.

#### surprise

The publicity tours are hard; they've always been hard, and they're getting harder. He has to stand next to Viggo, smell Viggo's hair gel, see the faint sheen of perspiration at Viggo's hairline, and not touch him, not lean into him, not let the gravity of Viggo's smile pull him entirely into Viggo's brilliant orbit.

He sits at his window, insomnia curled up in his bed like the rightful inhabitant, and watches the lights of Berlin flicker twenty-five stories below. There's a cup of raspberry tea on the table next to him, exhaling its honeyed, wispy breath into the sterile air. The light outside slowly turns to russet and gold and white, and he jumps when the door cracks open.

"Morning," Viggo says, and puts the coffee pot, with the hotel's silver crest on the side, on the table so carefully that there's no clink of wood and porcelain. "You okay?"

"Yeah," he says, and Viggo pours a cup full of liquid dark as memory. He watches Viggo tip his head back and swallow, the long line of his throat stark in the tender dawn dappling the walls, Viggo's mouth on the lip of the cup, Viggo's fingers curled through the handle, and he doesn't ever want to stop watching. He doesn't ever want to look away. He will, when he has to, he'll fix his gaze elsewhere, but he doesn't have to yet.

He twists in the chair, ignoring the pops in his spine, and hooks his hand over the back of Viggo's neck. He pulls Viggo down for a kiss, the bitterness of coffee underneath the salt of Viggo's tongue and the sweetness of Viggo licking the corners of his mouth, heat and liquid and gritty, sharp awareness flaring beneath his skin.

When he pulls back, Viggo looks dazed, his pupils blurred and his mouth wet. "Jesus," he whispers. "Did I do that to you?"

"The coffee's good," Viggo whispers back.

#### lack

"D'you ever wonder," George begins to say, lifting his chin in thanks as Orlando pours another. They're sprawled on the floor of the bathroom, for no good reason, and the wine sloshes onto the white tile.

"No," Orlando says. "I don't."

"Poor man," George says, and stretches out, drapes his legs over the bathtub; his eyes are glassy, and Orlando hopes, uncharitably, that he won't cry. It's been a long day, and he's not sure what city he's in, and he doesn't remember why they're drinking red wine in the bathroom at six in the morning. He doesn't want to be that bloke. But George's smile is sweet and artless, and Orlando tamps down his irritation, because forgiveness, even if George doesn't know it's necessary, feels slick and rich in his mouth, like roasted marrow on homemade bread. "You should."

"Some day," Orlando agrees. "Maybe."

He doesn't wonder, no; he dreams. He hopes. He hopes hard, these days, dreams fiercely, but he doesn't wonder. He left that far behind on the other side of the world's rim, with calendar pages of muscled men, crumpled t-shirts stained under the arms, nail polish piled in a drawer always left open.

He doesn't need to wonder. He has knowledge, certainty, bone-deep and kiss-tender, and that's wondrous enough.

#### question

"Come here," Viggo sighs, as if that's the answer to this mess, as if his embrace is enough to soothe the bees humming under Orlando's skin, as if Orlando's pacing will stop when the cage of Viggo's arms locks around him, as if the heat of his skin can shield Orlando from the probing gaze of the collective curious.

"Thought you'd never ask," he mumbles as he settles in gratefully. He noses aside the collar of Viggo's shirt, nests his teeth in the tendon that stretches behind Viggo's ear, feels the yo-yo that dangles from his heart and knocks against his ribs coil up in quiescence.

"You don't need to wait for that," Viggo says. He nods. Viggo grips his jaw. "I mean it. Don't wait for me to ask."

Orlando wishes it were that easy. He wishes he could know what he needs, in between the hot needs of the other queries that scorch the inside of his mouth like chili-cinnamon hot chocolate. He wishes he could make assumptions, feel secure enough to walk in and take the fleshiness of Viggo's biceps and the arc of his hipbone as his own possessions, but he wears doubt like contacts, seeing everything through their warping lens.

#### listen

His accountant is appalled. "This is not physically possible," she says. "This is—this is Jackie Kennedy buying _sable underwear_!"

He raises an eyebrow. "Beg pardon?"

"You—how did you _do_ this?" Amanda looks at his phone bills again, and shakes her head, amusement creeping over her features. She doesn't dress like an accountant, despite her age, and he fixes his gaze on the hem of her white wool minidress.

He tries a sheepish smile. "I'm a talented bloke?" he offers.

"Jackass," she says, shaking her head. He hears every word of what she's not saying: yes, you are. You're talented and sweet and charming and what makes you so special? What's so special about that? Everyone in this town is talented.

Amanda doesn't pretend to care about him; she doesn't dislike him, but she also doesn't like him any more than she has to. She says she's too old to fake it.

It's why he likes her. Orlando feels his practiced smile morph into a genuine one. His skin doesn't protest the curve of his lips, and he's not surprised, just pleased. It's become a familiar gesture, and he thinks the phone bills are a small price to pay for this newly-rediscovered ability.

He'd pay almost anything so he can listen to the hitches in Viggo's breathing, the slow rasp of inhale, the wet hiss of exhale, the scrape of a tree branch on a window twenty feet and a continent away. He's listening so he won't forget the width and breadth of Viggo's silence.

#### scribbles

Orlando's been finding sticky notes all over the house, these last few days. Pale yellow, neon orange, electric blue, purple, green like the first aching glimpse of spring, so bright it can't be natural; some of them have words scrawled on them, in Spanish, English, Danish, transliterated Arabic. Some of them have whole phrases.

Some of them are blank.

He never sees Viggo write one of them and he never peels them off the fridge, the back of the toilet, the side of the hot-water kettle, the arm of the squashy sofa, the folded-over flap of the dog food, the inside cover of Ginzberg's _The Cheese and the Worms_, the October page on the calendar, the salt shaker, nor even his favorite red mug.

He doesn't read them. He's not sure why.

#### his

"Mine," Viggo murmurs one night. Orlando finds himself pushing Viggo away, throwing the soft blankets off his thighs, shoving his way through the desert-hot and ocean-wet air, kicking the plumb-line of the door crooked. The next time he inhales, he's on the steps of the back deck, raindrops stippling his shoulders, curled up like an still-wet infant.

"Orlando?" Henry had been in the living room, a lamp throwing his face into relief, planes and angles of concern. "You okay?"

"No," he admits, and hears Henry's footsteps crush the carpet fibers as he walks away.

"Orlando?" Viggo's pulled on dark-blue boxers, and his surprisingly thin frame is shuddering with cold. He doesn't move, or approach, as if Orlando's some wild, fey creature who needs gentling. "I'm sorry?"

The roses in the garden are all closed against the rain. "I'm not."

"Sorry? Or mine?"

#### whispers

Orlando's sorting through his necklaces, untangling them, opening clasps and untwisting kinks. He glances up when the light in the doorway vanishes, but it's only Viggo, shirtless, holding a cup of cold tea. He bites his lip, promises himself for the thousandth time that he'll start wrapping the necklaces instead of tossing them into a red velvet box with corners long since rubbed bare.

He knows he won't.

Viggo leaves a moment later, the soft brush of his feet on the wooden floor sounding like vows—come with me, he tempts, follow me to the ends of the earth.

Viggo doesn't always keep his promises, but sometimes he does.

#### bed

It's not the mattress or the 300-thread-count sheets or the fuzzy fleece blankets or the squashy pillows that he looks forward to. It's not even the sight of who's waiting for him under the covers, although the mountain range of the body beneath the covers is a wild landscape he hopes he's the last person to venture into; it's the moment before, when he stands in the doorway and the frame of his body blocks the light from the hallway. That's when he feels most solid, most real, most alive and awake; it's only then that he can sleep.

#### ladder

Viggo tosses down three glossy bells of fruit and it's as much as Orlando can do to catch the last one. He dumps them in the fraying basket, which is already half-full, and eyes it. "Are we going to eat all these?" he asks, dubious.

"Sauce, butter, pies, stuffing, baked, with pork, bread," Viggo recites. "Grace'll figure it all out."

"It's so weird that you call your mum Grace," Orlando says, and he nearly slips on a rain-slick windfall underfoot. The sweet scent of rotting fruit rises around him, and the mist that lingers in the Adirondacks that line the horizon is like dragon's breath. "Why is she trying to feed me constantly?"

"She always wanted more kids. Wanted a daughter."

"Oh, you cunt!" Orlando sputters. "I should tip the ladder and fuck the apples!"

"Supposed to be keeping me safe," Viggo reminds him, hand gripping a branch just in case.

"Your _heart_," Orlando says. "Cunt."


End file.
